Craig Benzine speaking at VidCon 2012 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. Wikicommons\/ Gage Skidmore. Some rights reserved.30 years ago, it was easy to
\nsilence ideas. Not reporting on something could guarantee its obscurity. The
\ninternet changed all that by allowing almost anyone to start up a blog, vlog,
\nor website and do their own reporting.<\/i><\/p>\n
By lowering the barrier to entry,
\nwould-be journalists and political commentators have emerged from every corner
\nof the internet. As global internet access has increased, so too has our
\ncollective ability to make the media our own.<\/p>\n
This scares dictators. It\u2019s why
\ncountries such as North Korea, China,
\nand Turkey
\nhave a censored internet, an extension of the other kinds of media censorship
\nin those countries. As Xi Jinping put it, the media must \u201clove the party, protect the party, and closely align
\nthemselves with the party leadership in thought, politics and action.\u201d<\/p>\n
So far, so fascist. But what about in functioning democracies? Why is it that
\ncountries like the UK and the US talk of a mainstream media bias when, in theory at least, the media belongs to
\neveryone?<\/p>\n
\nIn the UK, there\u2019s no denying that print media leans right. Of the seven biggest selling newspapers in the UK, the two most popular (The Daily Mail and The Sun)
\nare right-wing, the Guardian and The Mirror are left-wing, and the rest are all
\nright-wing. By sheer numbers, there are simply more right-wing newspapers being
\nsold in the UK. For every one left-wing newspaper that gets sold, more than two
\nright-wing newspapers get sold.<\/p>\n
Online, things are more
\ncomplicated. When news websites are ranked by the number of pageviews from the UK they received
\nin February 2017, the biggest is the
\nBBC. It\u2019s not even close. The BBC received over 1.7 billion pageviews that
\nmonth, 35% of all the traffic for the top 100 news sites in the UK. The BBC is
\nfollowed by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, MSN, and the Daily Telegraph. Those sites
\nreceived 331 million, 318 million, 293 million, and 169 million views
\nrespectively. <\/p>\n
MSN is not a publication based in the UK. However, that\u2019s what the internet
\ndoes; it erodes borders. As such, over 318 million British people clicked onto
\nMSN to get their news in February 2017. <\/p>\n
So at first glance, it looks as if the internet eliminates media bias in the
\nUK. With the assumption that the BBC is a neutral publication, the left-wing
\nand right-wing publications for the top 100 biggest news sites in the UK get
\naround 600 million pageviews each for the month of February 2017. The rest of
\nthe views go to business, tech, and local news publications which don\u2019t lean
\none way or the other. <\/p>\n
Except that local news does<\/em> have a tendency to lean one way or the other Still, most of that cancels itself out with pageviews for those local, \nFor as long as there has been a BBC, there have been worries about BBC bias. Jump ahead to the modern day and the question of which way the BBC leans depends The problem with talking about Online, the four biggest news websites in the US according to pageviews in April 2017 were MSN, ESPN, Drudge Report, and Google News. The only openly conservative news site on that list is Fox News. The others are The left-leaning Guardian has accused the search engine of having a right-leaning bias with its autocomplete function. The right-leaning Wall Street Journal has accused If rigorous analysis of online Though just because news media is In 2016, a survey revealed that 62% of Americans get their news from social media YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Google: This dislike of ideas which upset the status quo has helped to censor people from all over the political spectrum. So whether it\u2019s because you are pro-Trump, pro-LGBT, pro-menstruation, or even pro-breast cancer awareness, your ideas are going to be suppressed by huge This is censorship, and it is worrying, and it is something that those who Across all social media sites, news feeds are personalised. As such, if you It\u2019s true that \u2018the establishment\u2019 is often against both men. But the idea that The Craig Benzine speaking at VidCon 2012 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. Wikicommons\/ Gage Skidmore. Some rights reserved.30 years ago, it was easy to silence ideas. Not reporting on something could guarantee its obscurity. The internet changed all that by allowing almost anyone to start up a blog, vlog, or website and do…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ndepending on the politics of the city. What is more, you could argue that all
\nthose tech publications tend to lean left, espousing a pro-science,
\npro-equality Silicon Valley rhetoric. You could just as easily argue that all those
\nbusiness publications tend to lean right, espousing a pro-capitalist,
\npro-business economically liberal rhetoric. <\/p>\n
\nbusiness, and tech publications shifting and changing month by month. What\u2019s more,
\nthe issue pales in comparison to the elephant in the room: the BBC\u2019s widely
\ndisputed neutrality.<\/p>\nThe BBC leans…<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nMore often than not, these accusations come from the government, with every Prime Minister since the BBC\u2019s inception grumbling about its anti-government bias. This
\nworrying reached fever pitch during Thatcher\u2019s reign when the Tories did much
\nmore than grumble. They claimed, publicly and repeatedly, that the organisation
\nhad a left-wing anti-government bias. Conversely, there are those who claim that \u2014
\nduring the Wilson era \u2014 the BBC had a pro-government bias. <\/p>\n
\non who you ask. If you ask the left-wing Owen Jones of the left-leaning
\nGuardian, he\u2019ll tell you that the BBC leans right. If you ask Tory MP and current Health Secretary
\nJeremy Hunt, he\u2019ll tell you that the BBC leans left. The left-leaning New Statesman refers to a study
\nclaiming that the Tories get more coverage than Labour. The right-leaning Telegraph refers to a study claiming that left-wing policies get more
\ncoverage than conservative ones.<\/p>\n
\npolitical bias is that you inevitably run into political bias. With
\npublications like the Guardian or the Telegraph, this isn\u2019t a problem. Both
\npublications are openly left-wing and right-wing respectively. As such, there
\nis no debate. With regards to the BBC, this is a problem as the organisation
\nclaims to be neutral. And there is a debate.<\/p>\n\nMainstream
\nmedia bias in the US<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n<\/strong>Print media in the US has the
\nopposite problem to the UK. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the
\nWashington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are the four biggest selling newspapers in the US. The Wall Street Journal is right-leaning, but the Washington Post and the New York Times lean
\nleft. So too does the Los Angeles Times. As such, it\u2019s fair to say that more left-leaning
\nnewspapers get sold in the US than right-leaning ones. <\/p>\n
\nThree of those are news aggregator sites which link out to other news sources
\nand one of them is a sports news site. Discounting those, the next biggest
\nwebsite is CNN. This is followed by Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sport (which can be
\ndiscounted as well), Fox News, and then the Washington Post, the Huffington
\nPost, and BuzzFeed. <\/p>\n
\neither aggregators, sports news websites, neutral, or liberal. None of this
\nshould be surprising considering that since 1971 journalists in the US have more often identified as liberal than conservative. In 2013, just seven per cent of journalists
\nidentified as Republican compared to over a quarter of journalists identifying
\nas Democrat. <\/p>\n\nAre
\nnews aggregators neutral?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n<\/strong>In the US and the UK, news
\naggregators receive huge numbers of pageviews. Unlike the BBC, these sites
\ndon\u2019t produce their own content. All they do is link to other news sources. Still,
\nit\u2019s perfectly possible for a news aggregator website to express bias through
\nthe news it chooses to link to and how it presents this news.
\nThis further complicates the question of online media bias in the US. Drudge Report has a clear pro-Trump bias, being run by the openly pro-Trump Matt Drudge. Yet, with Google News it\u2019s not as black and white
\nand, just as with the BBC, it depends on who you ask. <\/p>\n
\nthe search engine of a left-leaning bias with its results. The left-leaning Independent argues that Google\u2019s image search has a race bias. The right-leaning Washington Times argues that Google is run by a bunch of liberals.<\/p>\nThe new news<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nnews media and news aggregators reveals anything it\u2019s that digital news is fractured.
\nWhat\u2019s more, besides some enormous organisations, there isn\u2019t really any such
\nthing as a \u2018mainstream news media\u2019 online. <\/p>\n
\nfree from an overall bias it doesn\u2019t mean that social media is. And just
\nbecause there isn\u2019t political ideology bias doesn\u2019t mean that there isn\u2019t bias.
\nFor social media, it\u2019s not so much a matter of left and right but a matter of
\nwhat is \u2018acceptable\u2019 and what is not. Google does have a bias. Though, as with
\nall of the other social media giants, it may be a different breed of bias. <\/p>\n
\nsites. Online news is important, but
\nit\u2019s evidently not where the vast majority of web users spend their time and
\nless and fewer people are getting their information directly from news sites.<\/p>\n
\nthese are some of the biggest websites in the world. News websites don\u2019t even come close in terms of
\nusage and influence. And, while there is no one person or political group who
\ncontrols these sites, if there is one thing that none of them like, it\u2019s
\n\u201ccontroversial\u201d or \u201coffensive\u201d content.<\/p>\n
\norganisations who would rather that your ideas were a little less disruptive.
\nNone of this is done in the name of pushing a particular political agenda. It\u2019s
\ndone in the name of pleasing advertisers, who like it when things are vanilla,
\nand keeping as many people on their websites as possible. <\/p>\n
\nvalue freedom of speech should protest against. However, it would be too
\nsimplistic to call it a right-wing or a left-wing bias. While it\u2019s true that both
\nconservatives and radicals have reason to be critical of Facebook\u2019s neutrality, the real issue is the way in which all social media algorithms try to feed us information which is
\nuncontroversial and already confirms our existing biases.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
\nlean politically one way or the other then your experience on that site will
\nlean with you. Prominent American YouTuber Craig Benzine noted the true extent
\nof this after the 2016 US election. Despite his massive social media reach, he
\nrecalls how almost every post he saw in relation to Trump\u2019s
\nvictory was negative.<\/p>\nNever let the truth get in the way of a good story<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n<\/strong>There is a media bias online, but
\nit\u2019s not a media bias which fits into the narrative of the left or the right.
\nAccording to openly right-wing Fox News, alliances such as the \u201cDeep State\u201d are
\nfueling an anti-Trump media conspiracy. The story is half-correct. The media is
\noverwhelmingly critical of Trump, but it\u2019s also half-incorrect. After all, the
\nBritish left just as easily argues that there is an anti-Corbyn media conspiracy.<\/p>\n
\nthe \u2018establishment\u2019 is one entity is wrong. Different countries are filled with
\ndifferent establishments, each with their own interests. Moreover universities,
\nbanks, medical research bodies, international trade associations are made up of
\na range of experts with a range of ideas. When scientists unite against Trump or economists unite against Corbyn, that\u2019s not a conspiracy: it\u2019s a difference of
\nopinion.<\/p>\n
\nbad news is that, while the people are more than willing to call out the
\npolitical biases of others, they are terrible at recognising their own
\npolitical biases. Reactionist right and reactionist left are becoming
\nincreasingly polarised by their own social media bubbles. The good news
\nis that the increase of free and open internet access across the world has
\nhanded the media to the people. The result is a change in grammar. The old
\nmedia was singular; the new media are plural.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"